Deer Luhan,

I take it fanmeets aren’t normally as… chaotic? as this.  I think you should hold one in Laser Quest.  It would be fun.

Leigh

I’m still not sure if it was out of genuine concern for the manager’s reaction or because he wanted Tao to look as ridiculous as the rest of us, but Chen convinced him to get rid of half his right eyebrow too the next morning so that he “wouldn’t get blamed” for what had happened.

“It’s a new fashion,” I heard Kris insisting to the stylists, trying to calm their frenzied anger.  He’d already had the same argument with the manager and somehow – God only knows the mysteries of the galaxy and the universe – persuaded him that it meant all six of us looked more macho.  “Have you genuinely not seen it going around?  It was everywhere in North America just a few weeks ago.”

“Challenge,” Chen said with a smirk, though not loud enough for Kris to hear.  “The benefit to being North American is that they won’t dare contradict him, the d*mn bat.”

I surreptitiously nudged Lay, who was standing beside the chair a hair stylist had forced me into, and he leant down so I could whisper in his ear.

“Does Kris always spout this kind of bullsh*t to cover for you guys?”

Lay withdrew and grinned at me.  “Bullsh*tting is one of his strengths,” he mouthed so that Chen wouldn’t hear.  “He’s the best in EXO at that.”

Whether or not they accepted half a missing eyebrow was fashionable in the western world, the makeup artists did insist on trying to repair the damage with eyebrow pencils as much as they could and we all ended up with our hair sweeping down into our right eyes, with the exception of Chen, whose hair was too short.  He did fortunately have the slimmest eyebrows out of the lot of us, though, so once you were standing a few feet away from him nothing looked out of the ordinary.

“Somebody’s seriously going to die when I find out who did this,” he muttered in Korean as he attempted yet again to smooth his hair down over his eyebrow.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lay edge away and I chuckled inwardly.

At last giving up on his uncooperative hair, Chen dropped his hands with a sigh and then turned to me and grinned.  “Hey, wanna go over Miracles again while we wait?”

“Sure.”  Not really.

It was about twenty minutes until the interview we were supposed to have before the fan meet, and then Chen and I were supposed to sing the first verse of Miracles in December even though it was January before we all sat down and started interacting with the fans.  I wasn’t looking forward to it.  At all.

I still wasn’t a patch on Luhan, but once again, Chen put it down to recovering from the throat infection.

“We probably ought to apologise for that before we sing,” he muttered, unravelling his earphones from his iPod.  “Can you work out what to say?”

Blanching, I got out my phone so I could send a text to Lay.  “No problem.  I’m on it.”  Sh*t.

Lay, how do I phrase a formal apology for my inability to sing?

I saw him looking up from whatever he’d been watching on his tablet and glancing at his phone with a grin.  Moments later, a reply popped up.

Have you considered ‘Hello, everybody, I’m not EXO’s Luhan’?

I scowled at him.  He noticed and stuck his tongue out with an impish grin.

I don’t want to die.  And you owe me one for destroying half my right eyebrow.

His expression turned flat.

Luhan told you, didn’t he?  Fine, fine, just learn this….

We were being called for the interview before I quite knew what was happening.  Xiumin fell in step alongside me as we left the waiting room.

“Ready for this?” he asked.

“Nope.”

He chuckled.  “It’s not as bad as you think.  Your singing can be put down to illness and as for the rest, well, we didn’t notice, so I doubt anybody else will.”

I turned to him with a despairing expression.  “I’m not going to be asked to solve a Rubik’s cube again, am I?”

“Hey, you saw the transcript, right?  Not a chance.”

I relaxed.  Marginally.

“How are you feeling about meeting the fans?”

“Scared.”

“It’s in a more controlled setting than the airport.”

“But I don’t know how to do this!”

“Smile at them and apologise every so often for not saying anything because your throat is still painful.  And otherwise, just sign and flirt a little.”

“Flirt?”  I grimaced, clutching at my right arm.  I’d spent five hours the previous day perfecting a forgery of Luhan’s signature, and my arm still hurt.  Luhan was going to have to hide his chequebooks, though, so I at least felt I’d gained something from it.

Then something else struck me.  “What if I don’t understand what they’re saying to me?”

“If it’s a yes or no question, pick one or the other and smile.  Otherwise, just say you can’t speak much.  Oh, I nearly forgot.”  He produced a scarf from the pocket of his blazer.  “Wear this.  It’ll look more convincing.”

I gratefully wound the scarf around my neck.

The interview went off much more smoothly than the previous one had done: whereas the last time I hadn’t been able to speak at all and had been expected to write answers down, I answered the questions I was capable of this time and then handed the mic on to somebody else for the ones I knew I wasn’t going t